11/29/2014

No matter how many people come to Thanksgiving at my house, when the dishes have been cleared, several pounds of turkey meat and a tall carcass are still there.

The challenge is how to store the remains of a creature the size of a wedding cake. Often framed as a question of what to do with leftovers, it’s actually a real estate problem: 1/2 cubic foot of refrigerator space versus 1 cubic foot of turkey.

There are several ways to deal with the aftermath. One of my friends serves her family a dish made of diced turkey and leftover gravy mixed into a mound of rice. They refer to it fondly as “Glop.”

My solution is chili. One inspiration for this recipe is the chili that Chef Tom Hashagen and his BOCES Culinary Arts students made for at least 15 years at Shelter Island’s 5K post-race celebrations.

The other inspiration is the excellent selection of spices and ground chilies at Maria’s Kitchen (55 North Ferry Road). Maria Schultheis roasts and grinds her anchos to order. I keep a bag in my freezer — ready to deploy as needed. The chilies impart a sweet, smoky taste that is great with turkey.

The foundation of this quick stew is a rich stock that I make on Thanksgiving, starting right after dinner and partially solving the refrigerator capacity problem. At that point, one more pot to clean is collateral damage.

Take off the remaining meat, break up the carcass and put it in a pot with a large, unpeeled carrot, two ribs of celery, a quartered onion and just enough cold water to cover it all. Bring to a boil, turn down to a very low simmer and go do something else for three hours. Then strain it; refrigerate four cups for the chili and freeze the rest.

11/24/2014

Terry Brockbank left the United Kingdom for the United States in 1968. Forty-six years later, when he says the word, “theater,” as he often does, his London and South Wales roots are still audible, his diction perfect.

Terry is an actor who took a 20-year break from his craft, had a successful career in information technology and is now back at it. He and his wife, Kathy, divide their time between a home on Midway Road and their apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. Both locations, Terry points out, have easy access to excellent theater.

In the role of Lord Brockhurst in the recent North Fork Community Theatre musical comedy, “The Boyfriend,” Suffolk Times reviewer Toni Munna wrote that Terry “had the audience roaring with laughter.”

On December 14, Terry will narrate the “Christmas Cantata” at the Shelter Island Presbyterian Church, and on December 21 he and Kathy will perform a series of holiday readings at the Presbyterian Church, including Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”

Born in London, Terry grew up in South Wales, studied physics in London and moved to Richmond, Virginia at 26 to work in textile technology — specifically nylon. Engineer by day, he was an actor by night, starting with “The Man Who Came to Dinner” at the Virginia Museum Theatre. He did nine shows in two years.

By 1970, demand for nylon had cratered, Terry was laid off, and he moved to New York City to be a professional actor. “I tried for about six months,” he said. “As much as I like theater, I did not like starving.”

He found his way to Electronic Data Systems, a company founded by the billionaire from Texarkana, Texas, Ross Perot, “who was willing to train people of my age who had some experience of the world.” Soon, Terry was shaking the hand of the man who would be a two-time presidential candidate.

Based in New York, Terry joined a company of fewer than 100 employees in the field then known as data processing.

“Perot was a driven man, but his views were about as far opposite from mine as could be — very, very right wing,” Terry said. “You had to have extremely short hair, wing-tipped shoes, a white shirt and no facial hair. I was conforming to his requirements, but in New York City in 1970 I stood out like a sore thumb.”

When he left EDS in 1974 it had 2,000 employees. He continued his career in information technology, retiring in 2004 after 14 years at the insurance company, New York Life.

In 1971, Terry ran into actor Kathy Dyas, who would become his wife, at the home of a mutual friend in New York. They had met four years earlier in Richmond, at the cast party for “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” Her father, Jimmy Dyas, was the director.

“Nine years later, I married the director’s daughter,” Terry said.

That same year they saw an ad for The Pridwin. “We had probably been across the East River twice in our lives to go to a Mets game,” Terry said, “We called and said, how do we get there?”

The folks at the Pridwin came to pick them up from the ferry and the couple experienced Island-love at first sight.

For many years when they spent time on Shelter Island, they rented. By 1991 their son Derek was 10 years old and in need of summertime activity. “Kathy said, ‘Why don’t we buy a house and it can be summer camp?’ I came out on weekends,” Terry said. “It probably molded his entire career … he spent a lot of time at Mashomack.”

Now in his 30s, Derek Brockbank is campaign director for National Wildlife Federation, National Audubon Society and the Environmental Defense Fund’s joint Coastal Louisiana Restoration project.

Terry and his wife had both stopped acting “cold turkey” when Derek was born, but continued to enjoy being in the audience at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor and North Fork Community Theatre in Mattituck.

Although husband and wife hate flying and have never been big travelers, in January 2013 they decided to cruise from New York to Australia, a round trip that would take about 45 days.

“We got as far as Florida and my mother died in England,” Terry said. “It was a strange feeling to be trapped and have to decide. We thought it really wasn’t feasible to get off and beside, my mother would have killed me. We got back and went to her memorial in England.”

In 2007 he played Colonel Pickering in “My Fair Lady” at the North Fork Community Theatre. Since then he has directed and performed in dozens of plays and readings there and at the Hampton Theatre Company, Northeast Stage, the Shelter Island Presbyterian Church and the Shelter Island Players.

Terry loves working with “an entire range of people,” he said, “Some are in college, some are retired like me, people you wouldn’t get to socialize with under any other circumstance. They respect my experience and I respect that they can sing and dance.”

11/21/2014

Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows, flanked by the equally delicious, but less traditional dessert version.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on November 20, 2014

I grew up in the South with a Methodist father and a Jewish mother; and my husband, Steve grew up Jewish in the Bronx.

Before we married, I came to Thanksgiving with Steve’s family, bearing my Kentucky grandmother Ruby’s traditional sweet potato marshmallow side dish generously flavored with bourbon. Since this was a cultural exchange, I decided not to worry about resistance to a “vegetable side dish” that contained cream, sugar, butter and whiskey topped with a 3 inch layer of toasted candy.

In retrospect it was a good call. Steve’s mother ate the sweet potatoes, put aside her doubts about this confection disguised as a vegetable and decided if her boy stayed with me, he would not go hungry.

His family insisted that I bring, “that Sweet Potato Pie” every year; in spite of the fact that it contained no sweet potatoes (in New York, all I could find were yams) and was not a pie. One year, Steve’s Aunt Mildred complained that I had gone too light with the bourbon. I never made that mistake again.

I also make a version using a caramelized topping instead of the traditional “Sta-Puft.” It is delicious, as easy as the traditional one, but I would never bring it to Steve’s family for Thanksgiving. Like General Tso’s Chicken, Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows is not just a dish, it’s a legend.

*You can make it ahead up to this point, and finish it right before serving it.

The crowd-pleasing version:

Spoon it into a baking dish and top with marshmallows to cover. Bake at 350 degrees about 20 minutes, or until the marshmallows are toasted.

The gussied-up version:

Put six, 4-5oz ramekins on a baking tray and divide the potato mixture evenly between the dishes, smoothing the surface of each with a spatula. Divide the brown sugar between the dishes and smooth it with the spatula. Do not mix the sugar in; it should cover the entire surface in a ½ inch layer of sugar. Immediately put the tray with the ramekins underneath the broiler, rotating the pan as the sugar melts and caramelizes.

There’s a day in November when families on Shelter Island gather at their dinner tables and eat the same meal as their neighbors.

Not turkey, that’s later. For fishermen, their families and friends, on the first Monday in November, the menu is Peconic Bay scallops.

On Monday, a ritual central to the lives of many Island families, and timed to the life cycle of a striped mollusk, unfolded as it has for decades. Fathers and sons, husbands and wives, rose before dawn, endured 18-mph winds and “real feel” temperatures around freezing, steered their boats into the rolling waters of the bays and at first light threw out the first scallop dredges of the new season.

John Kotula and his son Wade were loaded and ready to go, but still debating where.

John and Wade Kotula preparing to head out, not saying where.

“There’s a Dr. Seuss story about the man who can’t decide at the fork in the road. That was me all night,” John Kotula said, “Maybe we’ll get enough for dinner.”

From preliminary reports, Mr. Kotula and his fellow baymen didn’t go hungry Monday night. Kolina Reiter at Bob’s Seafood Market saw a lot of scallops coming in off pickup trucks and into the back room opening day. “More than there’s been in a long time,” Ms. Reiter said, “It’s a bonanza.”

One signifier of a good season is price. This year’s abundance brings scallops to around $15 a pound retail, versus $20 a pound on opening day in 2013.

BOUNTY OF THE BAYSThe Peconic Bay scallop is a distinctive creature, living only 18 to 20 months in the bays, harbors and creeks of Eastern Long Island. They are tiny, sweet, and since the late 1980s, very rare.

Under New York State law, scalloping is permitted from the first Monday in November through March 31 in state waters. Opening day for local waters such as Coecles Harbor, West Neck Creek and Menantic Creek is one week later.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation put these regulations in place to protect the mollusk, which nearly disappeared in the late 1980s after flourishing through 100 years of commercial fishing. Organizations such as the Cornell Marine Scallop Program have worked to restore the scallop population by seeding, including a 2005 initiative that put out millions of young scallops — called bugs — and generated measurable improvement in Orient Harbor.

DREDGING THE PASTScallops link Shelter Island’s culture to history. The culture, of making a living from surrounding nature, is fading but still preserved by Islanders, and the history lives in people’s memories and at the Shelter Island Historical Society.

“That’s Charles Congdon,” said Phyllis Wallace, archivist at the Society, as if Mr. Congdon might walk through the door any minute. Ms. Wallace was holding a 130-year-old invoice for the sale of 23 pounds of scallops by C. A. Congdon to John Elsey, a New York seafood distributor from December 1884.

The sale took place five months after the Long Island Rail Road linked New York City and Greenport, marking the beginning of commercial scalloping on Shelter Island when rail access brought the Island’s seafood to one of the largest, and hungriest, cities in the world.

Receipt documenting the sale of scallops by C. A. Congdon to John Elsey, a New York seafood distributor, in 1884. (Shelter Island Historical Society)

Scalloping technology today hasn’t changed much from the best practices of the 1880s; pull a dredge — a frame with a bag attached — behind a boat. The bottom of the dredge hits the scallop and the tide pops the scallop into the bag.

For 60 of the last 100 years, the prime place to get a dredge was from Paul Nossolik, aka “Paul the Blacksmith,” who made them by hand in a soot-coated barn in Greenport until he retired in the 80s — his and the 20th century’s.

The key to immortality for an artisan is working in a durable medium, such as iron. It’s hard to find a local bayman who doesn’t own several of Paul the Blacksmith’s creations, made to order, passed down from a father or brother, or a lucky yard sale acquisition.

Keith Clark still uses sloop dredges with a sharp edge made in that Greenport shop. He recalled watching the blacksmith working at his forge with bellows, hammer and anvil. “It was amazing to watch … every dredge was custom made, a lost art today,” Mr. Clark said. “His fingers were black and there was soft coal all around the shop up to your knees. You came out of there smelling like a smoked eel.”

Keith Clark still scallops with dredges made by hand by Paul Nossolik.

Paul the Blacksmith made dredges sized for all the waters where mollusks were found. Large dredges with a sharp edge were used on “outside waters” with a sandy or “hard” bottom. Smaller dredges, with a chain instead of a bar designed for a “soft bottom,” usually mud, were generally used in inside waters, such as Coecles Harbor. The smaller dredges were also lighter, and many a scalloper gracefully aged into using them over the course of a lifetime.

WATERMARK MEMORIESSkip Tuttle was 12 when he began scalloping with his father, Maurice, in the late 1950s. “I got a commercial license when I was 14,” Mr. Tuttle said, “so young that my father had to sign for me.”

His scalloping days started around the time the first significant laborsaving device came into use — the motor. Prior to that, it was either a man or the wind that powered scallop boats.

In a rowboat, it was manpower. Baymen used a technique called warping. “Put down an anchor, let out 400 feet of line, the bayman hauls the boat along the line with the dredges pulling along behind,” Mr. Tuttle said, “It took a lot of strength to haul the boat and the dredges before there was power.”

A type of sloop called a catboat was the vessel of choice for scallopers who used windpower to drag dredges before motors were permitted. With the mast very close to the bow, no jib and just a mainsail, they were stable. “They were fat, almost round, and you sailed on the beam,” Keith Clark remembered.

“Catboats were the perfect platform for work. Didn’t draw any water. In Menantic Creek they could put the nose up on shore and open scallops on the beach.”

HOLDING ONSteve Lenox has scalloped “since I was big enough to get on my father’s boat,” he said. “I’ve seen the good years and I’ve seen the bad years.” Lenox remembers opening day 28 years ago, his brother’s 50th birthday. “We went out and everything was dead. Brown algae killed everything.”

Like many scallopers, Mr. Lenox is a hands-on environmentalist. “You’ve got to give back,” he said. “If you’ve got bugs around you’ve got to throw them back.”

Now in his 70s, Ed Clark has been scalloping for most of his life with his wife, Ann, at his side. She said, “My job is to cull and put them in the bushel baskets. Standing in one spot you tend to get colder. The men are pulling dredges, so they get warm.”

“I wear a gold scallop shell around my neck all the time,” Ms. Clark added, “My husband gave it to me.”Going out on opening day is an essential tradition in her family. “It gets in your blood,” she said. “You’ve got to go.”

Scalloping was an important source of income for the Clark family for many years, helping them raise their five children. Ms. Clark is proud that everyone in her family knows their way around a scallop knife.

“There is a certain technique,” she said. “Some people don’t know how to open a scallop anymore. My children were opening scallops in second grade, standing on a stool. They called me ‘Slave driver.’”

“From the 30s until 1985, scalloping was a basic part of many a family’s living,” Mr. Tuttle said. “You could take 10 bushels a day every day for the whole season, and many did. The price was 25 cents a pound when I was 14 years old. If the price went up a nickel, it was the talk of the town.”

LIVES WEIGHED IN SCALLOP SHELLSIt’s not easy to talk about the loss of a way of life, especially when it’s your own. What was lost when the scallop business collapsed in the late 80s went beyond a local industry. “The facts and figures don’t show what was lost when the scallop industry died,” Keith Clark said.

Harvesting scallops might mean $20 a day, $100 a week at a time when a basic salary might be $200 a week, Mr. Clark remembered, and it was a cash business.

“Even if you didn’t scallop for a living, you went out,” he said.

The local economy in the winter was fed by scallop dollars. Anita and Louis Cicero, owners of the Shelter Island Barber Shop, saw the collapse measured in fewer haircuts. “There weren’t as many middle class, year-round families out here anymore,” Ms. Cicero said, “When the scallop business died, that’s when it started to be a more seasonal population, and it got to be very hard for people to make a living in the winter.”

HOPE SPRINGS IN NOVEMBEROn Monday, scallopers returned to the docks with full bushel baskets, hauled them into licensed basement processing rooms, rounded up anyone who still knows how to open a scallop and got to work.

The harvest looks good.

“The first night, I like to give all my friends a scallop dinner,” said Skip Tuttle. The Yogi Berra of baymen, his advice to first time cooks: “Don’t cook ’em too long. When they’re not quite done, they’re done.”

11/06/2014

When I heard that Tom and Ray Magliozzi would stop making new episodes of “Car Talk,” my first thought was, Thank God, I put the Volvo out to pasture. I don’t want to care for a classic car in a world without the moral support of Tom and Ray Magliozzi.

But Tom Magliozzi had Alzheimers, and this week, he died. At that moment, a lot of love vanished from the world.

Love. The late, great Tom Magliozzi exuded it. The love between Tom and Ray that was palpable in their on-air interaction. After my father died, Tom and Ray were the only men in my life who could talk cars with me. I never talked back, but that was OK. Unrequited love is my favorite kind.

In 1996, my Volvo 245 wagon, with 100,000 miles on it, started making a noise like a tremulous whine that morphed into a higher-pitched grinding when I turned the steering wheel--but only when turning left and uphill. I called the “Car Talk” line and described the problem, even clearing my throat and warming up a bit to make my vocal recreation of the sound as accurate as possible. As soon as I said it out loud, I felt better, like going to confession, or talking with therapist. Just expressing the problem made it solvable.

My car problem did not get on the show, and I had to take my Brick (affectionate term for a Volvo—it’s a Car Talk thing) to a garage, where they were nonplussed by my performance of “the noise.” But I knew that Tom and Ray had my back. They would never let one of their listeners continue to drive if the problem was life-threatening.

Tom and Ray inhabited an automotive world that I remembered—a time when the stuff under the hood of a car could be understood, even reasoned with, a time when my dad expected me to check the oil, the belts, the water levels myself. When mere mortals changed their own oil, and when you got a flat—you knew what to do, and it involved getting out of the car. Tom and Ray were witnesses. Those days were not illusory. It happened that way, and now it is gone.

Goodbye Tom, and goodbye to the brotherly love of Tom and Ray. What you gave me will endure for at least 250,000 miles with regular oil changes.

11/03/2014

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTOLouis and Anita Cicero standing before one of their ‘Walls of Fame’ of Island memorabilia.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter, October 30, 2014

Louis Cicero has been Shelter Island’s barber for 55 years. Equal parts town historian, mayor, confessor and known to all as “Louie the Clip,” he also, by the way, has a beautiful head of hair.

Louis and his wife, Anita, have been partners in hair care and life for 37 years. Some couples finish each other’s sentences. Louis and Anita start the same sentence simultaneously, and keep talking until one of them capitulates, letting the other finish.

“We are very grateful to have lived the American Dream,” they said in stereo.

If you need an example of Louis’s place in the community, talk to a Springer, since he has cut the hair of five generations of the family: Harry, Al, Artie, Kevin and now 5-year-old Henry. Recently, the family gathered around Louis’s vintage 1946 chair to celebrate this landmark of Island barbering and community.

The shop has always boasted a great location. Built in 1926 as a bakery and gift shop, it was called the Gingerbread House, the first stop for churchgoers coming down from Our Lady of the Isle after services on Sunday mornings.

In 1946 it became a barbershop and in 1959 Louis arrived as assistant to the new owner. Haircuts were $1.75. Although he’d grown up in East Hampton, he had never stepped foot on the Island before, and had some doubts about the commute.

Unimpressed with the size of “that little wooden boat,” he thought,“Geez, are we going to make it across?”His parents had been born in Sicily before immigrating to America. His father didn’t become an all-American but he was the 1959 Suffolk County bowling champion. “Nice form,” Louis said, “I could never beat him. Used to use a two-finger ball and went to three fingers.” Something rubbed off since Louis is the longest-playing male member of the Shelter Island Mens Bowling League and Louis’s Clippers have been league champs 10 times.

Louis’s mother, Pauline, worked for 40 years at an East Hampton Italian restaurant, still in operation, owned by a cousin named Sam Nasca. Louis said, “Sam’s was famous. I know about pizzas pretty good; onion, thin crust, the real Italian sausage, nothing but the best. He made his own dough, nothing frozen.”Louis ran track and played football and baseball for East Hampton High School.

He recalled playing baseball against Hall of Famer and East End legend Carl Yastrzemski, who grew up on a potato farm and played for Bridgehampton. “I played against him in 1956,” said Louis, “He was ‘farm strong’ from throwing all those sacks of potatoes.” The man who would become “Yaz” hit .512 for his career at Bridgehampton High.

Louis’ team? “We got nowhere.”

The biggest difference between today’s high school baseball players and those of his day, said Louis, is “they’re bigger now.”

Louis has three grown sons from a previous marriage, Michael, Steven and David, and four grandchildren. Michael works in banking and lives in Rhode Island. Steven and David live and work in Scotland. David was a professional musician and played with the Pet Shop Boys in the 1990s. He now works for Sky TV.

Over five decades, Louis turned his one-room barbershop into a living, hands-on museum. The collection includes some of Louis’s own sports highlights including a photo of the East Hampton High School Hall of Fame football team of 1952. Louis was a freshman and not one of the larger players. “I got creamed a couple of times,” he said, “I was game.”

The shop walls chronicle the triumphs of the Shelter Island High School teams whose players’ hair he cut, such as the championship basketball team of 1968-69,with Suffolk County scoring champion, Bobby Miller. “Coach Zabel always made them keep their hair short,” Anita said, and Louis added, “so they all came in here together.”

Anita looked wistfully at a photo of the 1982 SIHS boys soccer team. “Their hair was a little longer,” she said.

In the business-end of the room stand two vintage 1940s-era barber chairs and the 1927 cash register from the Crescent Beach hot dog and scallop shop called Strobel’s. This cash register invented the term, “cha-ching.”

Anita was born near Buffalo and studied education at Wittenberg University in Ohio. By the time she graduated, teaching jobs were scarce, so she worked the summer of 1974 as a waitress at Mitchells, a restaurant that occupied the spot that is now Mitchell Park in Greenport.

One day a handsome guy with perfect hair walked in.

Their courtship was unconventional. Louis said, “First date I took you to Sam’s in East Hampton. My mother was there.” Since Anita hurt her back waitressing, many subsequent dates involved Louis taking Anita to see a chiropractor in Silver Beach. “We got to know each other that way,” Anita said. They married in 1977.

In 1984 Louis and Anita built an addition and Anita began her own beauty shop. “I inherited some of the wives of the guys who were coming in,” she said. “For 25 years I had a career with those ladies and, just like the men, they were very interesting people. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. ”

Louis still gives Anita the occasional loving performance appraisal. “You got to keep cutting while you are talking to people,” he said, “When we have our little disagreements, she says, ‘O.K., fire me!’”

About 10 years ago, Louis won a car valued at $45,000, gambling at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. It was his third time inside a casino. Anita said it must have been a slow news week, because the headline in the Reporter that week was “Islander Clips Casino.” Louis remembers the headline was “Islander Scalps Casino.”

Like all good barbers, Louis knows that people in the chair need to talk. “They tell me their secrets and problems,” he said, “They know I won’t tell anyone.”

In the past decade or so, Louis and Anita have cut back on the eight-hour days on their feet and have done a little traveling. They visited each other’s homelands, Germany and Italy. In Rome, they saw the famous statue of Cicero. “Same nose as my father,” said Louis.

They also spend two or three weeks, several times a year, in the Catskills, at Anita’s parents’ place. Louis’s feelings about that are mixed. “Bear and bobcats, right in the back yard. It’s a nice house up there, but once they had 32 inches of snow in 18 hours. We had to shovel to find my car. Wintertime, they can have it.”

Dancing was one secret to the physical and emotional endurance of their relationship. At Legion functions, fundraisers and school sock hops, Louis and Anita were there. “When there is dancing, we always start it off,” said Louis, “I’ve had a good partner over the years.”

Another secret Louis and Anita were glad to offer: “Live each day well,” in stereo, of course.